News
Microsoft Blocks Lebanon-Based Hackers Targeting Israel
The hackers were abusing Microsoft’s file hosting service, OneDrive, to target private and government organizations in Israel.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) has successfully identified and disabled an attack orchestrated by a Lebanon-based activity group called Polonium.
The group was abusing Microsoft’s file hosting service, OneDrive, to target private and government organizations in Israel. Based on its tools and techniques, it seems that Polonium is affiliated with Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).
“Polonium has targeted or compromised more than 20 organizations based in Israel and one intergovernmental organization with operations in Lebanon over the past three months,” explains MSTIC.
The good news is that all legitimate OneDrive accounts are completely safe because the attack didn’t involve any security issues or vulnerabilities. Instead, Polonium used the file hosting service for command and control to execute part of their attack operation.
Polonium’s targets include primarily organizations in critical manufacturing, IT, and defense industry. “In at least one case, Polonium’s compromise of an IT company was used to target a downstream aviation company and law firm in a supply chain attack that relied on service provider credentials to gain access to the targeted networks.”
MSTIC is still actively investigating how Polonium gained initial access to many of their victims, but it knows that most victims were running Fortinet appliances. Based on this fact, MSTIC suspects that the CVE-2018-13379 vulnerability was used to gain access inside the targeted organizations.
Also Read: Is Your Phone Hacked? How To Find Out & Protect Yourself
While the threat has been contained, there are certain actions MSTIC recommends all organizations to take to protect themselves, such as confirming that Microsoft Defender Antivirus is updated, enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA), and blocking in-bound traffic from specific IP addresses.
This isn’t the first instance of threat actors using OneDrive and other similar file hosting services to achieve their nefarious goals. Last year, for example, Microsoft discovered that OneDrive was used to host malware files commonly used to launch Conti ransomware attacks.
News
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.
Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.
The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.
Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc
— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026
“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.
Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.
Also Read: Lebanon’s 5G Era Begins With 150 Stations And A $1M Budget
The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.
Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
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